Unquenchable Fire

by Rachel Pollack

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe that’s true. But maybe it doesn’t care. Maybe it knew, twenty years ago, I would come here today. And so it set that woman up. Because it was easier than looking for something else. Is that what happened?’

  ‘Do you really want to know? Suppose I said “no”. Suppose her suffering had nothing to do with you. Would that lessen her pain? Would it release you from caring about her? And suppose I said “yes”. Would that convict you of some crime?’ Jennie said nothing. ‘Do you see, Jennifer? It doesn’t matter. What I told you before remains. Whatever its origins her suffering exists only for itself. As does yours. No one was belittling your suffering. All human pain is the same.’

  ‘You act like that woman doesn’t matter. Like I only care about her because I feel guilty. But the fact that I care at all means that love exists.’

  ‘You love her because you can share her misery. Didn’t I tell you that love belongs to suffering?’

  ‘Excuse me,’ came a woman’s voice, annoyed. ‘Can I get some cookies?’

  ‘Sure,’ the vendor said, and Jennie waited while the woman bought a mixed pound of chocolate chip and walnut chunk.

  As soon as the woman had gone Jennie said, ‘Why does the Agency have to use people?’

  ‘What else can it use?’

  ‘But what does it want?’

  ‘It wants to help.’

  ‘Why can’t it leave us alone?’

  ‘You mean, why can’t it leave you alone? You would sacrifice everyone else just so you would not have to discover things you would rather not know.’

  ‘Sacrifice what? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Listen to me, Jennifer. People will accept suffering because they must, but they will do everything they can to avoid ecstasy.’

  ‘Because it obliterates love?’

  ‘Because it is real. And because it demonstrates to them that suffering is real and cannot be answered or justified. They will battle that with everything they’ve got. However much we open the road they build new barriers. They cover themselves in mud and wrap themselves in steel to weigh themselves down. But we will not allow them to do that.’

  ‘Why? Because you love them?’

  ‘We serve reality.’

  She shook her head. ‘Your reality. A reality that doesn’t understand people. A reality that thinks—thinks I don’t matter. That what I want doesn’t count. That love doesn’t count. Just because it belongs to the tomb world. But that’s where we live. How can you understand us if you don’t understand love? You think you can push people together and then cut them apart just to create an effect. That it doesn’t matter as long as you get the effect you want. That I’m just selfish or something because I don’t want to be pushed around. But if I don’t count, and Mike, and my father, and that old woman, then who does? I’m sorry.’ She was crying. ‘I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t talk to you like this. I wanted help, and you came, but you can’t help me. I should have realized. I’m so stupid.’

  The vendor opened the lid of his pushcart and stuck his arm down to the bottom. He came up with a large yellow cookie dotted with chocolate. ‘Take this,’ he said. Jennie took the cookie in both hands and held it close to her chest. She could feel nothing from it. The vendor said, ‘When you can’t climb any higher eat a piece of this.’

  ‘Climb?’ She looked at the cookie and noticed that each piece of chocolate was shaped like a face. She put the cookie in her bag beside the Revolution Mouse doll. ‘Thank you,’ she said.

  ‘I’m sorry I couldn’t help you,’ he said.

  ‘Are you?’ She was about to leave when a thought occurred to her. She said, ‘Where do babies come from?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I’m not allowed to tell you that.’

  Jennie shrugged. Sick of Seventh Avenue she headed northwest up Bedford Street. At the corner of Morton Street she looked back. The vendor still stood there, selling cookies to a group of children.

  Morton Street turned to the right after one block to intersect Barrow Street. On one side Jennie passed a pair of old houses with a garden between them. The garden was small and closed off by a low concrete wall. Inside, a white metal chair lay on its side against a tree. The head of some metal deity stared out from the garden’s centre. Though Jennie didn’t recognise it from any of the ones she’d seen in shops or catalogues, she looked with longing at the way it seemed to protect the houses around it.

  On the other side of the street she passed a theatre with a red awning, and then a tavern. On a ledge above the tavern’s doorway a small windmill, no more than a foot high, spun its blades.

  Jennie walked up Barrow to Hudson, where she turned right, past an antique store and the children’s bookshop where her father used to drop her off, and the owner would formally serve her milk and spirit crackers on a silver tray while she sat in the corner and pondered which book Jimmy should buy for her.

  Just past Christopher Street she passed an open doorway leading into a bare room where a group of people sat around a naked woman who stood speaking and gesturing to them. Jennie stepped through the doorway into a vestibule off the main room. Dripping water and mud onto a pile of shoes she watched the woman move her arms about. Long needles pierced the skin above the elbows and the knees, but the woman didn’t seem to notice them. She crouched or spun around, cupping her hands in front of her or lifting them up above her head.

  She’s a storyteller, Jennie realized. She was telling them a story. It didn’t sound like any of the official ones. It didn’t sound like anything Jennie had ever heard before.

  ‘In those days,’ the woman said, ‘all the people were slowly turning into dust. The world was emptying itself out. Each day the buildings became more and more transparent and the janitors had to close off the top floors to prevent people being lifted through the holes in the roof and carried away by metal birds. The Tellers had all shrunk to the size of dogs. When they had to face the people they hid behind cardboard pictures of themselves. They used wires to pull the arms and to open and shut the mouths. They wore microphones, and when they could no longer even speak they switched to voice simulators. They cut holes in the cardboards, otherwise the wind would have grabbed the pictures and smashed them against the sides of buildings.

  ‘In those days all the people were slowly turning into dust. The Tellers had become afraid of their stories and ordered the faceless workers to bury the stories in boxes under the ground. All night the Tellers played loud music, otherwise they would hear the stories weeping and begging their former lovers to release them.

  ‘Now, in that time there lived a musician, a woman born with a stone whistle between her lips. As she became older and had played in every land she lost all desire but one—that her daughter follow her in carrying the “traces of God” to the people. But the daughter refused, and whenever her mother bought her a new instrument she spat on it.’

  Wait a second, Jennie thought. That’s me. She’s talking about me and Beverley.

  The woman said, ‘So the musician fasted and rubbed herself with sap from the sacred forests, and she slept in a room full of steam to open herself for a message. In her dream a Benign One came to her. He came disguised as the brother of her dead husband.’

  Idiot, Jennie thought, Jimmy didn’t have a brother.

  ‘“Be at peace,” the Benign One told her. “Your daughter will give the world something more precious than music.”’

  ‘Years passed and the daughter became a woman. One day she went to a Day of Truth Recital where a group of cats knocked over the cardboard puppet to reveal the shrunken body of the Teller. All around her people wept, but the woman walked into a field full of yellow flowers. She plucked the flowers from the ground until nothing was left but mud. “This is what they’ve done to us” she shouted. “They’ve left us nothing but our bodies. I will give you my body.”’

  Jennie said, ‘That’s wrong. I never offered myself.’

  ‘The woman prayed all night,’ the storyteller
said. ‘She collected all her tears in a white bowl made of fish bones and in the morning she mixed them with blood and spit and even her urine and then she went up on the roof and threw the liquid towards the rising sun. A great wind came up and clouds covered the sky. For three days the sun didn’t appear while the wind smashed open the gold doors of the Tellers’ residences.

  ‘On the last day a huge swan flew down and knocked the woman to the ground. Just as the swan penetrated the woman’s hymen, a shout shook the city. The stories shouted with joy that the deliverer would release them.’

  ‘No,’ Jennie said loudly. ‘That’s all wrong. I didn’t ask. I just fell asleep. That’s all. And I wasn’t a virgin. I was married. I mean—’

  People turned and shushed her. The storyteller went on, ‘On the night the woman gave birth the moon laughed out loud. The sound shattered mountains. It split the sky so that all the people gathered round the woman’s house could see the lines of souls waiting patiently on the other side.

  ‘The shrunken Tellers realized their danger. They sent out armoured cars to kill the deliverer. But the road cracked and broke the cars’ axles. The enemy marched on foot. But the wild dogs of the city bit their legs and forced them to retreat. Then some of them turned into birds and flew towards the house, hoping to peck out the baby’s eyes and tongue. But helicopters flew up and the blades blew the birds across the river into the Broken City. And then the shrunken Tellers knew they had lost.’

  Jennie said, ‘It won’t happen that way. It’s not going to be like that.’ She shouted, ‘You’ve got it all wrong. What about me? Why don’t you think about me?’

  Two men with amulets around their necks came and stood before Jennie. They looked like they might be father and son. ‘Please leave,’ the older one told her.

  Jennie crossed her arms. ‘Go to hell,’ she said.

  The younger one said, ‘You’re disturbing our story.’

  ‘You’re damn right I’m disturbing your story.’

  With astonishing quickness they lifted her by the elbows and set her outside the door. She was still demanding ‘Let go of me,’ when the door slammed, and she was standing alone in the street. She rattled the door handle. ‘Liars,’ she shouted. She kicked the door. ‘Liars!’

  14

  Jennie groaned, shut the door behind her. She leaned against it, letting her bag drop on her muddy feet. With an effort she reached up to touch the belly of the threshold guardian mounted to the left of the door. ‘Blessed One,’ she murmured, ‘protect me and restore me to the perfect enclosure of this house.’ Her hand fell with a slap against her side.

  Jennie stood a few seconds listening before she bent to wrench off her shoes. Quiet. Wonderful, peaceful quiet. No practice squawks from the studio, no tapes on the speakers. Maybe Beverley and the gang had gone to work out their enactments at someone else’s house. She wondered if she should take off all her clothes before heading upstairs, to avoid getting cursed by the cleaning woman. She yanked up her bag for the trudge to her room all the way up to the third floor.

  Halfway up the first flight she saw the door of her mother’s bedroom swing open. Beverley stepped out onto the landing. She wore her blue silk dressing gown tied at the waist with a copper sash, a present from one of her lovers, who had the material left over from a piece she did in which she wrapped a replica of Manhattan Island in wire mesh. With her hair pulled back and her face giving off a scrubbed glow Beverley looked very young. Jennie felt childlike and clumsy. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘I’m going up to take a bath. Please don’t make dinner or anything for me.’ As if her mother was the type to bring her milk and cookies.

  ‘Well, no wonder,’ Beverley said. ‘You never did remember to feed them properly.’

  ‘Feed them properly?’

  ‘Now they’ll just keep coming back. They’ll just keep breaking the windows.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ She tried to step round but her mother seemed to flutter about the landing without looking at her.

  ‘That’s the trouble with dead people,’ Beverley said. ‘They always think you owe them something.’ She giggled. ‘You remember that time they stole Annie’s dress. Ripped it right off her back that day she went to visit the refugee camp.’

  ‘Refugee camp?’

  ‘I don’t want you drinking any of that stuff. You’ll just vomit up again like the last time.’

  What have they done to her?, Jennie thought. She backed away around her mother. Beverley followed her, saying, ‘You’ve got to watch out they don’t get at your liver. That’s the way they work. That’s what they’re really after. It’s not the eyes. It’s the liver.’

  ‘Stop it,’ Jennie pleaded. Was she always like this? Talking nonsense, words reeling off a tape somewhere, real conversation simulated only by accident. ‘Is that what you’re doing?’ she said. ‘Are you speaking from a tape? Are you making a tape of this now? Is this one of your goddamn experiments?’

  ‘First they disguise themselves. They pretend to be someone you know. They’re really very clever. Then once they get inside you they start tearing at everything.’

  Jennie shoved her mother away and hurried down the landing. Behind her Beverley thumped to the ground, still talking, still waving her hands.

  Jennie ran up the stairs to her bedroom. When she reached it the door was closed. She was sure she’d left it open. Jennie held the doorknob without turning it. She wanted so much to go inside and fall on the bed, lock the door against her mother, against all dreams and revelations. But what if there was something there? She was sure she’d left it open. Please, Jennie thought, please let go of me. I can’t take any more.

  She turned the knob and pushed delicately at the door. It swung about a foot, just enough for her to see the end of the bed, the crumpled quilt, the floor…There was something wrong with the floor. She could see into it, it kept pulling away from her, further and further the more she tried to fix her eyes on it. She’d seen something like that—The cookie vendor. His face, the way his face—

  Jennie knew. They were going to answer the question. They were going to let her know where babies come from.

  There were faces in the floor, a crowd of dead faces, slowly turning into dust. It’s the land of the dead, Jennie realised. It’s not where babies—But it was.

  She could hear voices, endless voices talking over and around each other. Voices, stories. It’s all the same place, she thought. It’s where stories come from. Babies and stories. They’re the same thing. And it’s the land of the dead. It’s all the same place. She whispered, ‘I don’t want to know this.’

  Jennie turned round the end of the corridor. There stood a narrow red door, the stairway leading to the roof. She pulled the door. It was stuck, maybe even locked. She yanked as hard as she could. Nothing. The cookie. The vendor said she should eat the cookie when she couldn’t climb any higher. Jennie searched in the bag she still held pressed against her body. When her fingers found the cookie it broke in pieces; the damp had weakened it. Trying not to notice the chocolate faces Jennie stuffed the biggest piece in her mouth and chewed as fast as she could. She waited. If anything, she felt weaker, too worn out to keep struggling any more.

  She heard a scratching noise on the other side of the door, and then a loud creak as the hinges turned. The door opened a couple of inches, wide enough for a large rat to run through and down the landing. Jennie laughed. A rat. A rat. What would her professors have made of an intercessor in the form of a rat? She pulled the door open and stepped into the stairwell. The door closed behind her. She leaned against it, catching her breath.

  Dust lay on everything, the red walls, the narrow stairs, the metal banister. At the top, a window in the roof door let in enough light to show her the way. She began to climb, each step a battle against the weight of her feet. In a few moments she’d forgotten everything except how tired she was, how much her back hurt, how the dust made it hard to breathe. Should she go down? If she went back now, could she rest?
She looked up at the window. The light pulled her onwards.

  A couple of steps and she’d gone halfway, and then it no longer seemed so hard. Her feet didn’t weigh her down, even the dust had left her lungs and she straightened her back as she took a deep breath. The window glowed, casting a golden tint on the banister, which now felt warm and smooth. At the top the door opened the moment she touched it. She stepped out into a fresh breeze.

  The rain had stopped, and though the late sun hid behind the buildings, it still lit the sky with a pattern of gold and red, like some story woven on a loom. The moon had risen as well, full and pensive, with a faint smile. Jennie waved at it. She noticed her clothes had dried, and all the mud had fallen off. Her pants even looked pressed. She wondered if that was what paradise would be, a place where your clothes were always ironed. When she rubbed the backs of her hands and touched her cheeks the skin felt soft, warm.

  She heard laughter behind her and turned to see small groups of people sitting around tables at the other end of the roof. They laughed and gestured and Jennie could breathe their joy all through her body. She walked up and found herself inside a Chinese restaurant. She saw a large Chinese family at a round table in the back, near the kitchen. The smell of dumplings and wind dried duck and odd-flavoured chicken danced through an atmosphere like a young forest. Jennie looked around; at every table the food and the people shone in the sun and moonlight, and all their clothes looked ironed. Beside her a Chinese woman stroked her daughter’s hair. The little girl’s cheeks filled with love.

  In the middle of the restaurant Jennie saw a naked man with ribbons tied to his arms and legs. ‘Jimmy?’ she whispered. He turned around, and yes, it was Jimmy Mazdan, still bedecked for his funeral. He gestured with his head and Jennie ran up to hug him. ‘Jimmy!’ she cried, ‘Jimmy, I love you.’ When she let go she saw Mike standing on the other side of her. With a grin he said, ‘I told the judge to fuck his annulment. I love, you Jennie. I want to be with you forever.’